Oscar Wilde’s lasting significance - World Socialist Web Site World Socialist Web Site Published by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) Oscar Wilde’s lasting significance By David Walsh 28 July 1997 The occasion of Moisés Kaufman’s play, Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, currently running at the Minetta Lane Theatre in New York City, provides the opportunity to begin a reexamination of Wilde’s intellectual legacy. Gross Indecency dramatizes the tragic events which befell the Irish-born playwright, novelist and essayist following upon his decision to sue the Marquess of Queensberry, father of his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, for criminal libel in March 1895. The Marquess, a quasipsychotic bully, had publicly accused Wilde of “posing” as a homosexual. The libel trial was a disaster for the writer. It was not difficult for the defense to prove that he had done more than pose.

Making use of the evidence about Wilde’s sexual activities that had emerged, the police arrested him and he was charged under an 1885 act that made all forms of “gross indecency” between males, consenting or otherwise, punishable offenses. The ensuing trial ended in a hung jury. The government pressed on, and, in a subsequent trial, obtained a conviction; Wilde was given the maximum sentence, two years with hard labor. After his release from prison in May 1897, he emigrated to France where he died three years later. Kaufman has attempted, at least in a limited fashion, to show that Wilde was not hounded merely on account of his sexual orientation. The prosecution introduced his “art for art’s sake” outlook during the trial as proof of his depraved character. The play suggests that Wilde’s homosexuality, combined with his aesthetics, espoused moreover by an Irishman with socialistic views, represented an affront to Victorian English society that could not go unpunished. The fact that Gross Indecency has enjoyed considerable popular success is a heartening sign that an audience exists for works of some substance.

Oscar Wilde has been very much with us both as a personality and a creator and critic of artistic work over the course of the past century. Whether they have approved or disapproved of him, it has proven difficult for artists and intellectuals of the most diverse persuasions to ignore him. There is something in his life and work that continues to compel not merely interest, but partisanship. He is, so to speak, an unresolved issue. Born in Dublin in 1854, Wilde entered Oxford two decades later, where he came under the influence of art critic and historian John Ruskin, and, more thoroughly, Walter Pater, aesthete and author of Studies in the History of the Renaissance(1873). Wilde inherited tastes and principles, in the words of critic Edouard Roditi, “which allowed him to progress ...

to a doctrine of art for art’s sake which respected only perfection of workmanship and allowed no ethical considerations to interfere in its appreciations.” It was at Oxford that he proclaimed his desire to “live up to his blue china.” In 1879 Wilde brought to London, according to Arthur Ransome’s early critical study, “a small income, a determination to conquer the town, and a reputation as a talker.... He adopted a fantastic costume to emphasize his personality, and, perhaps to excuse it, spoke of the ugliness of modern dress.” Within three years he became the butt of caricatures “several times a month” in Punch, one of the principal organs of British philistinism. Wilde had his first play, Vera, or The Nihilists, a melodrama about Russian revolutionaries, published in 1880. The following year his first collected edition of poems appeared. Wilde’s most productive period began in 1888 and continued until his imprisonment.

During this time he wrote his collection of “socialist” children’s stories: The Happy Prince; The Picture of Dorian Gray; The Soul of Man Under Socialism; a volume of important critical essays, Intentions; and his major theatrical pieces. He wrote his extraordinary De Profundis while in prison, and The Ballad of Reading Gaol upon release. Wilde’s social views Wilde’s social outlook emerged from an interplay of influences: his Irish family background, his mother’s radical views and, above all, his epoch. “Of society’s stratification and conflicting class interests, Wilde was indeed as conscious as any artist of his age,” comments Roditi. The same critic notes that Wilde was a dandy not of the 1850s and 1860s, like Baudelaire, but of the 1890s. It was a period of substantial and growing social tensions. An estimated 2 million people in London lived in poverty. At the end of the previous decade British workers had begun to construct mass industrial unions. The Social Democratic Federation, an avowedly Marxist organization, was founded in 1884; the Independent Labour Party in January 1893.

Wilde’s trial coincided with the anti-Semitic witch hunt of Alfred Dreyfus in France. The need of the ruling class to rally the petty-bourgeois masses around the defense of the nation was increasingly a critical political fact of life in both France and England. Wilde’s artistic lifestyle and his homosexuality were held up as exotic and degenerate imports that threatened to unman the British Empire, increasingly facing rivals in many parts of the globe. If Wilde’s avowal of extreme aestheticism, on the one hand, and socialism, on the other, seems peculiar, it should be noted that these were by no means considered mutually exclusive intellectual tendencies either in England or on the Continent in the 1890s. Nonetheless, what is one to make of an aesthetic that declares: “All art is quite useless”? The problem has to be approached historically.

Plekhanov, in his Art and Social Life, argued convincingly that “the belief in art for art’s sake naturally arises among artists wherever they are out of harmony with the society around them.” He wrote that it was natural that the French Romantics “were revolted by the idea of ‘useful art.’ In their eyes, to make art useful was tantamount to making it serve the bourgeoisie whom they despised so profoundly.” In his work on Wilde, Roditi says, “As a conscientious objector to the social order in which he lived, many a nineteenth-century artist ... sought evidence of his own integrity in his utter uselessness.” Farther on he writes: “In an ugly age, Wilde believed that art should not imitate life but art.” Wilde wrote, “To project one’s soul into some gracious form” is “perhaps the most satisfying joy left to us in an age so limited and vulgar as our own, an age grossly carnal in its pleasures, and grossly common in its aims.” He rejected an art of “moral uplift,” practiced by a vast array of Victorian writers, which amounted, in the final analysis, to a legitimizing of existing institutions and conditions.

To defend himself and his work he was obliged to state, and believe, that “Art never expresses anything but itself.” But few artists, paradoxically, have been more consumed at such a deep level by moral and social commitments. (G.B. Shaw pointed out that when he attempted to get various literary figures in London to sign a petition asking for a reprieve for the Haymarket defendants, Wilde was the only one who signed.)His best plays, An Ideal Husband, The Importance of Being Earnest, as well as Dorian Gray, in addition to demonstrating Wilde’s renowned wit, provide a devastating glimpse of the morals and mentality of the ruling circles, among whom he circulated. The creative personality If Wilde’s artistic work and criticism is read historically and dialectically it reveals, above all, a belief, held onto in the face of great odds, in the vast power of thought and the thinking subject. In an age dominated by the concept that art (and other intellectual activities) held up a passive mirror to nature and life, Wilde fought tenaciously for the opposite view: that the decisive role in life was played by the creative personality.

His famous dictum that life and nature imitated art is easy enough to dismiss, but one might consider its implications before doing so. When Wilde’s spokesman in The Decay of Lying declares, “At present, people see fogs ... because poets and painters have taught them the mysterious loveliness of such effects. There may have been fogs for centuries in London.... But no one saw them.... They did not exist until Art had invented them,” he had come upon something that was a closed book to the average artist and intellectual of his day. Of course such concepts can be abused, and have been in our century, but they contain essential particles of truth. So too in politics Wilde rose far above the Fabians, his contemporaries and supposed cothinkers. In his deeply humane and subversive essay, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, Wilde, in fact, heaped scorn on piecemeal approaches to the social ills produced by capitalism. Of the reformers he said, “their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it....

The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible.” Wilde reminds us forcefully that there is a visionary component to socialist consciousness when he writes, “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at.” One might put the matter this way: Wilde expressed many truths which, due to his class background, the nature and tone of his times and, equally significantly, the undeveloped, and somewhat unreceptive, state of socialism in England, took the form of paradoxical quips, but which in reality pointed toward critical intellectual issues of the twentieth century. They could only make themselves known to those acutely attuned to the broadest questions bound up with the transformation of society. It should come as no surprise then that Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution bears traces of Wilde’s influence, interpreted through the prism of a historical materialist outlook.

While Wilde baldly asserts that socialism will be of value chiefly “because it will lead to Individualism,” Trotsky writes, in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, that “heightening of the objective quality and the subjective consciousness of individuality [in the proletariat] is the most valuable contribution of the cultural advance at the threshold of which we stand today.” Wilde begins his essay by noting, “Now and then, in the course of a century,” great scientists like Darwin, poets like Keats, have been able “to realise the perfection” of what was in them. “These, however, are exceptions.” He ends his piece by explaining that through socialism, working in the service of individualism, “each man will attain to his perfection.” For his part, in the final passages of Literature and Revolution, Trotsky also addresses himself to man’s harmonizing and perfecting himself in the communist future. He concludes his work, “The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx.

And above this ridge new peaks will rise.” Arthur Ransome remarks that when Wilde “was sent to prison the spokesmen of the nineties were pleased to shout, ‘ We have heard the last of him.’” Ransome added, “To make sure of that they should have used the fires of Savonarola as well as the cell of Raleigh. They should have burnt his books as well as shutting up the writer.” Wilde insisted that life had to be remade along aesthetic lines. “Now Art should never try to be popular,” he wrote. “The public should try to make itself artistic.” The modern world trusted “to Socialism and to Science as its methods” to do away “with poverty, and the suffering that it entails,” that when man had accomplished this task, “he will be saner, healthier, more civilised, more himself.” A century later his thought retains its full validity.

Articles about Gross Indecency - tribunedigital-chicagotribune `Gross Indecency' Coming To The Court By Richard Christiansen | June 19, 1998 Court Theatre has landed the hot, long-run off-Broadway property "Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde" for its upcoming season. The show, written by Moises Kaufman and using extensive courtroom records of Wilde's London trials for homosexuality, is to open Court's season, Sept. 11-Oct. 11. ENTERTAINMENT 'Indecency' in a karaoke bar By Nina Metz, Tribune reporter | October 29, 2010 "Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde" ✭✭1/2 The first trial of the three was a civil suit, brought by Oscar Wilde against the father of his willful young paramour, and it would lead to two further criminal trials and finally a conviction on charges that Wilde — the floppy-haired, sleepy-eyed literary wit, bon vivant and Victorian-era celebrity — had committed acts of...

Advertisement Court Theatre Gives `Wilde' A Longer Run By Richard Christiansen | October 2, 1998 Court Theatre's hit production of "Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde" has been extended four weeks, through Nov. 7, pushing back the opening date of its next show, Ingmar Bergman's "Nora," to Nov. 30. ENTERTAINMENT The meta-theatrics of Moises Kaufman December 3, 2004 Moises Kaufman, the innovative New York auteur-director, is known for a variety of distinctive, high-toned productions, from "The Laramie Project" to "Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde" to last year's Broadway hit "I Am My Own Wife." On the surface these works look completely different--"Laramie" is a collective exploration of the murder of Matthew Shepard; "Gross Indecency" is about the 19th Century fate of Oscar Wilde; "Wife" is a solo show concerning a German... NEWS Caption in a review of "Gross Indecency: The Three...

September 25, 1998 - A caption in a review of "Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde" on Page 2 of Thursday's Tempo was inaccurate. The three actors pictured were (from left to right) Krishna Le Fan, John Judd and Harry Althaus. Also, the name of the Marquess of Queensberry was misspelled in the review. - A story in some editions Wednesday said Cook County Circuit Court candidates George J. Smith and Melvin J. Cole had been found qualified by the Chicago Bar Association. They... NEWS American admits abducting girl, 12 By Items compiled from Tribune news services | February 13, 2004 An American man who wooed a 12-year-old British girl over the Internet for months before jetting off to Paris with her pleaded guilty Thursday to abducting the child. At the start of his trial in northwest England, Toby Studabaker, 32, of Constantine, Mich., also admitted incitement to gross indecency. The girl disappeared with Studabaker last July, sparking an international police search involving detectives in Britain, France, Germany, Ireland and the United States.

The girl's... SPORTS Toronto Arena Officials Speak Out By Jack Thompson | February 25, 1997 Maple Leaf Gardens officials are defending their actions in the sex-abuse scandal involving the arena. Brian Bellmore, counsel for the Gardens board of directors, said the arena was not legally bound to go to police over allegations that some of its employees were operating a sex ring involving youngsters. Martin Kruze, 34, went public last week with allegations that Gardens employees had coerced him and other boys into sex acts in exchange for tickets and hockey souvenirs. NEWS Germany extradites Marine accused in girl's abduction By Items compiled from Tribune news services | August 22, 2003 A former U.S. Marine who allegedly abducted a 12-year-old British schoolgirl he met on the Internet was extradited to Britain on Thursday. Toby Studabaker, 31, was put on a Royal Air Force jet in Frankfurt for the flight to Britain, where he faces charges of child abduction and inciting a child to an act of gross indecency. Studabaker was arrested in Frankfurt on July 16, four days after he and the girl flew from Britain to France.

Studabaker, of Constantine,... FEATURES Indecent Justice By Sid Smith, Tribune Arts Critic | September 24, 1998 `Gross Indecency," Moises Kaufman's drama of the trials and tribulations of Oscar Wilde, arrives at Court Theatre with great build-up. An off-Broadway sensation for a year and a half, the play is already a box-office draw for Court (with talk of a transfer), and it attracted, among other opening-night patrons, Mayor Richard M. Daley and his wife, Maggie. The build-up, for once, proves deserved. Of all the books and bio-pics on Wilde of late, "Gross Indecency" is probably the best. NEWS Goodman, Drury Lane Lead The Nominations For Jefferson Awards By Sid Smith , Tribune Staff Writer | September 15, 1999 The Goodman Theatre, buoyed by its Tony Award-winning revival of "Death of a Salesman," led the list of Equity theaters nominated for the 31st annual Joseph Jefferson Awards.

The Goodman scored 18 nominations for "Salesman," "Spinning Into Butter," "Jacob Marley's Christmas Carol," "Jitney" and the musical "Floyd Collins." Also heading the list were Drury Lane Oakbrook and Drury Lane Theatre with 16 and 12 nominations, respectively. Aside from the... ENTERTAINMENT 'Indecency' in a karaoke bar By Nina Metz, Tribune reporter | October 29, 2010 "Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde" ✭✭1/2 The first trial of the three was a civil suit, brought by Oscar Wilde against the father of his willful young paramour, and it would lead to two further criminal trials and finally a conviction on charges that Wilde — the floppy-haired, sleepy-eyed literary wit, bon vivant and Victorian-era celebrity — had committed acts of... NEWS The Trials Of Oscar Wilde By Contributing: Sid Smith | October 18, 1998 1.Literary career undone by sex scandal involving young man who was 21 when he met Wilde. 2.Press erupts over scandal, which makes front pages around the world for months.

3.Gifts to protege Alfred Lord Douglas play key role in evidence. 4.Constance Wilde proves unwaveringly loyal and, many argue, long-suffering. 5.Wilde commits perjury by denying his affairs with men. He even lies to his lawyer, insisting he is innocent of all charges. 6.Young men seem to come out of the... NEWS American admits abducting girl, 12 By Items compiled from Tribune news services | February 13, 2004 An American man who wooed a 12-year-old British girl over the Internet for months before jetting off to Paris with her pleaded guilty Thursday to abducting the child. At the start of his trial in northwest England, Toby Studabaker, 32, of Constantine, Mich., also admitted incitement to gross indecency. The girl disappeared with Studabaker last July, sparking an international police search involving detectives in Britain, France, Germany, Ireland and the United States. The girl's...

NEWS Court Theatre Gives `Wilde' A Longer Run By Richard Christiansen | October 2, 1998 Court Theatre's hit production of "Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde" has been extended four weeks, through Nov. 7, pushing back the opening date of its next show, Ingmar Bergman's "Nora," to Nov. 30. NEWS Germany extradites Marine accused in girl's abduction By Items compiled from Tribune news services | August 22, 2003 A former U.S. Marine who allegedly abducted a 12-year-old British schoolgirl he met on the Internet was extradited to Britain on Thursday. Toby Studabaker, 31, was put on a Royal Air Force jet in Frankfurt for the flight to Britain, where he faces charges of child abduction and inciting a child to an act of gross indecency. Studabaker was arrested in Frankfurt on July 16, four days after he and the girl flew from Britain to France. Studabaker, of Constantine,... NEWS Something Wilde By Chris Jones.

Special to the Tribune | September 27, 1998 From its beginnings Off-Off-Broadway in 1997, "Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde" (based in part on transcripts from the Victorian-era British courts that ultimately convicted Wilde of "acts of gross indecency with other male persons") has become an international hit. Directed by Gary Griffin, the play had its Chicago premiere Tuesday at the Court Theatre in Hyde Park. Speaking from Plymouth, England (where the drama is also being produced), Venezuelan playwright Moises Kaufman talked about... NEWS The Trials Of Oscar Wilde By Contributing: Sid Smith | October 18, 1998 1.Literary career undone by sex scandal involving young man who was 21 when he met Wilde. 2.Press erupts over scandal, which makes front pages around the world for months. 3.Gifts to protege Alfred Lord Douglas play key role in evidence. 4.Constance Wilde proves unwaveringly loyal and, many argue, long-suffering. 5.Wilde commits perjury by denying his affairs with men. He even lies to his lawyer, insisting he is innocent of all charges.

6.Young men seem to come out of the... NEWS Caption in a review of "Gross Indecency: The Three... September 25, 1998 - A caption in a review of "Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde" on Page 2 of Thursday's Tempo was inaccurate. The three actors pictured were (from left to right) Krishna Le Fan, John Judd and Harry Althaus. Also, the name of the Marquess of Queensberry was misspelled in the review. - A story in some editions Wednesday said Cook County Circuit Court candidates George J. Smith and Melvin J. Cole had been found qualified by the Chicago Bar Association. They... NEWS Priests` Sex Abuse Shocks Province By Howard Witt, Chicago Tribune | March 27, 1989 There is dread now every afternoon when Newfoundland's major daily newspaper, the St. John's Evening Telegram, hits the stands. People almost don`t want to know whether yet another priest has been charged with molesting boys. There have been seven so far-five active Roman Catholic priests and two former priests-all charged in the last 14 months with having sexually abused young boys in close-knit Newfoundland parishes.

Two of the practicing priests were convicted and sentenced to five years... FEATURES Indecent Justice By Sid Smith, Tribune Arts Critic | September 24, 1998 `Gross Indecency," Moises Kaufman's drama of the trials and tribulations of Oscar Wilde, arrives at Court Theatre with great build-up. An off-Broadway sensation for a year and a half, the play is already a box-office draw for Court (with talk of a transfer), and it attracted, among other opening-night patrons, Mayor Richard M. Daley and his wife, Maggie. The build-up, for once, proves deserved. Of all the books and bio-pics on Wilde of late, "Gross Indecency" is probably the best. The Truth Has Many Faces - latimes The Truth Has Many Faces Playright Moises Kaufman examines the artist's role in society through the trials of Oscar Wilde.

February 15, 1998 |Jan Breslauer | Jan Breslauer is a regular contributor to Calendar 'The truth," wrote Oscar Wilde, "is rarely pure and never simple." That's the epigram that prefaces the published version of Moises Kaufman's play "Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde." And it's also the artistic ethic that drives this highly acclaimed drama, which opens at the Mark Taper Forum on Thursday. Hailed by the New York Times as "the must-see sleeper of the [1997] Off Off Broadway season," the stylized, multilayered docudrama chronicles the precipitous decline of the famous playwright, who went from having two hit plays running at once in London's West End--"The Importance of Being Earnest" and "The Ideal Husband"--to being the defendant in a series of late 19th century trials on morals charges that led quickly to his imprisonment and ruin. Yet "Gross Indecency" is about much more than one man's travails.

Based on a range of often-contradictory primary source materials, the play is also a kaleidoscopic exploration of the role of art and the artist in society. It presents history not as a single authoritative narrative, but as a series of competing versions of the same story. The multiple viewpoints are precisely the artist's point. "As soon as I started reading, I realized there were as many versions of what had occurred as people who were involved in it," explains the personable Kaufman, 34, during a rehearsal break conversation one recent afternoon. "Everyone who had been present told a slightly different story of what happened. "When I was writing the play, I said 'Well, I'll just write things next to each other and later on I'll find out who's telling the truth," he continues. "Of course, the more I worked this way, the more I realized that I was never going to be able to find that out. The point became how do I create a piece of theater that can encompass all of those different versions rather than homogenizing them, which is what people usually do with historical events." Naturally, it was an artistic choice to render his subject in this particular "Rashomon"-like way.

Yet it was also a personal one, reflective of Kaufman's own vantage point since moving to the United States from his native Venezuela 10 years ago. "Because I'm Jewish and because I am gay and Latino and live in a society where I'm such an outsider, it has made me very aware of the structures that we create," says Kaufman. "There is a sense in which truth is a very personal thing. "The Orthodox Jewish community has very strong ideas of what's right and what's wrong. The gay community has a very strong idea of what's right and what's wrong. The Latino community has a very strong idea of what's right and what's wrong. This play is about realizing how we come up with those ideas." Born and raised in Caracas, Venezuela, Kaufman, who is of Russian-Jewish descent, attended a yeshiva (an Orthodox Jewish school) through high school. His early exposure to the performing arts came thanks to family trips to New York. As an adolescent, he also attended an international theater festival in Caracas, where he first saw the work of such theater and dance-theater luminaries as Jerzy Grotowski, Tadeusz Kantor, Peter Brook and Pina Bausch.

It was not until Kaufman entered college, however, that he actually began making theater. "I went to my first class at 9 o'clock in the morning, and it was accounting," he recalls with a certain rue. "Then, when I finished that class, I went downstairs to the activity center and asked, 'Is there a theater group here?' " What he found was the Thespis Theater Ensemble, now recognized as one of Venezuela's preeminent experimental companies. Kaufman joined the troupe as an actor and spent the next five years performing with it, including on tours of Latin America and Europe. During that time, he also managed to complete his studies. "I graduated as a business major," says Kaufman. "But by the end of that time, I realized that what I wanted to do was [theater]." Perhaps inevitably, he also began to outgrow the group that had given him his start. "After those five years, I felt that what I really wanted to be doing was directing," says Kaufman. "I felt that I couldn't do that in that company." He left the company and moved to New York in 1987 to undertake graduate studies in theater.

"At that point, the Experimental Theatre Wing at New York University had a similar vocabulary to what I was working with. It was a logical next step for me to go there." His particular interest--at that point, and still today--is theatrical language and form. He cites as influences Grotowski, Kantor, Richard Foreman and others--all artists known for styles that either abjure, or go far beyond, the bounds of realism, toward meta-theater. During the 2 1/2 years he spent at NYU, Kaufman explored the language of form even as he began to develop his own directorial style. Then, after his final NYU project--a production of Beckett's "Endgame"--Kaufman decided to form a company.

A Brilliantly Wilde Courtroom Drama / Moises Kaufman's `Gross Indecency' is a stimulating, unsettling, ruthlessly funny play - SFGate A Brilliantly Wilde Courtroom Drama / Moises Kaufman's `Gross Indecency' is a stimulating, unsettling, ruthlessly funny play Steven Winn, Chronicle Staff Critic Published 4:00 am, Thursday, December 4, 1997 Photo: CHRIS STEWART Close Image 1 of 1 Michael Emerson as Oscar Wilde (top) and Joey Collins as Lord Alfred Douglas in some play about Wilde. (Reporter couldn't be bothered to provide any further information.) Play being performed at the Theatre on the Square, SF. SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE PHOTO BY CHRIS STEWART less Michael Emerson as Oscar Wilde (top) and Joey Collins as Lord Alfred Douglas in some play about Wilde. (Reporter couldn't be bothered to provide any further information.) Play being performed at the Theatre on ...

more Photo: CHRIS STEWART A Brilliantly Wilde Courtroom Drama / Moises Kaufman's `Gross Indecency' is a stimulating, unsettling, ruthlessly funny play 1 / 1 Back to Gallery GROSS INDECENCY: THE THREE TRIALS OF OSCAR WILDE : Documentary drama. Written and directed by Moises Kaufman . (Through January 4 at Theatre on the Square , 450 Post St., San Francisco. Tickets: $25-$39. Call (415) 433-9500.) With the slam of a gavel and the cast members' penetrating stares, "Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde" startles the audience to attention and never lets go, making for an extraordinary night at Theatre on the Square. "Do not be afraid of the past," warns the soulful dandy Wilde, poised at center stage like some exotic bird in a bright red tie. From that line in the author's "De Profundis," writer/director Moises Kaufman spins out a brilliant, reverberant, heart-wrenching piece of theater.

The off-Broadway hit opened Tuesday, with the astonishing Michael Emerson reprising the role of Wilde he played in New York. If justice is served, this first West Coast production should run for a very long time here. The piece plays like a 2 1/2-hour theatrical epigram, stimulating, unsettling and ruthlessly funny. It is a fiendishly well- made courtroom drama about the trials for "gross indecency" with young work ing-class men that wrecked Wilde's life and career as a playwright and man of letters. Even though we know the eventual outcome of the trials, Kaufman and his excellent cast bring an agonizing suspense and textured reality to the proceedings in court and behind the scenes. In one gripping exchange, Emerson and a remorseless Remi Sandri , as a courtroom inquisitor, do battle over Wilde's unguarded remark about the physical appearance of a 16-year-old boy. Later on, Wilde's lover Lord Alfred Douglas ( Joey Collins ) wears down a frightened witness with a velvet upper-class touch.

Borrowing some Brecht and a bit from the experimental troupe Mabou Mines, Kaufman has invented a wholly original style of documentary deconstruction for the court transcripts, letters, memoirs, biographies and Wilde's writings that supply the text. Deployed across the top tier of Sarah Lambert 's set, the principal witnesses and wigged solicitors enact passages from the trials. Below, a Greek chorus frieze of narrators double as journalists, jurors, percussionists, prostitutes, Frank Harris , George Bernard Shaw and Queen Victoria . Facing the audience head on, they supply the trials' connective tissue, public rabble and visual footnotes. Every line in this theatrical speculation on the pliable definitions of truth is ironically confirmed by the books the four narrators gravely display like citations. The play's indictments, blurry stain of guilt and redemptive power reach well beyond Wilde by evening's end. "Gross Indecency" touches on a multitude of themes, from the subversive nature of art and changing strictures on homosexuality to the legacy of Victorian Puritanism and "morality" as a sort of shared public hypocrisy.

In the end, this remarkable work testifies to the courage it takes to invent a life and live it to the fullest. But the script never lectures, or settles for Wilde's durable wit, abundant and exquisitely expressed as it is here, to animate its ideas. In charting Wilde's precipitous fall at the end of the 19th century, "Gross Indecency" pries at the anxieties lurking on our own millennial brink. When the action leaps to the present, with a deft parody of gay literary politics, "Gross Indecency" explodes the very Victorian conventions Wilde challenged and opens yawning new uncertainties. Wilde's young lovers, legal abstractions in the first act, assemble like the "bright gilded snakes" of Wilde's description, lolling and caressing one another in their underwear. Then they become nightmare apparitions in bowler hats and funereal black suits. Emerson's long neck, elegantly curved posture, and discerning eyes pouched with sorrow make him a living mannerist sculpture, powerless in a world where "the slightest manifestation of feeling" is taboo. It's the very futility of his aesthete's arguments that make them so stirring.

When Wilde argues "how art might offer a new history of the world," he's all alone at a far edge of the courtroom, isolated there by a telling shift in Betsy Adams ' lighting. His gaze travels offstage to some distant horizon, as he dreams of a future he'll never know. Emerson finds the character's deep spaces without stinting the perfectly chilled vein of humor that flowed like champagne from Wilde. Asked about the "immorality" of a short story, he replies that it was far worse than that -- "It was badly written." Grilled about a bad neighborhood he may have frequented, he allows that it was awfully close to the Houses of Parliament. Emerson can give a simple "No" a heady blend of mock indignation and erotic wistfulness. His final exit, in this beautifully finished performance, is a marvel of wordless eloquence. Emerson is admirably supported throughout. A scrunched Michael Santo plays Wilde's Scottish adversary, Lord Alfred Douglas' father, and various other rivals in court. Collins is appropriately earnest and shallow as Lord Alfred. Michael Fitzpatrick mounts a noble defense in the role of Wilde's solicitor.

Sandri, barely controlling an exultant sneer, drips poison as Queensberry's advocate. James Asher stands out among the four narrators, but there's nothing to fault in the adept performances by Sheffield Chastain, Gregory Ivan Smith or Jonathan Haugen . "Gross Indecency" ends with a choral scene that gives this triumphant evening one final, mordant spin. Wilde himself has departed, but his clear-eyed vision of an earthly heaven and hell shine on as the lights come down. Latest from the SFGATE homepage: Click below for the top news from around the Bay Area and beyond. Sign up for our newsletters to be the first to learn about breaking news and more. Go to 'Sign In' and 'Manage Profile' at the top of the page. Importance Of Being Modern - The New York Times The New York Times Theater |Importance Of Being Modern Search Continue reading the main story There is something extremely moving about artists who are at the crossroads between two centuries. The best ones sum up what is past, embody what is passing and intimate what is to come. Or, as Oscar Wilde said, more stringently: ''The past is what man should not have been.

The present is what man ought not to be. The future is what artists are.'' When you watch the sexual unmasking and persecution of Wilde in the new play ''Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde,'' your first thought will probably be, ''How timely; how contemporary Wilde and his struggles were.'' Then, as you go deeper, you will think, ''No, it isn't that he's caught up with us, it's that we're still catching up with him.'' Wilde is still the supreme genius of self-invention. We ought to be ashamed of ourselves for using those words to describe every little pop singer or visual artist who dons a series of costumes to strike a set of poses against a series of backdrops. Self-invention at its best is the redesigning of cultural conventions and expectations in order to perceive oneself and the world in new ways and to new ends. At its worst, it is an erasing or suppressing of all those things in order to enhance one's status in the world. (The difference is between self-realization and self-glorification.) Continue reading the main story Wilde wrote his best work in the last 10 years of the 19th century.

And in 1895, five years before its close, he stood trial and went to prison for being a homosexual and, it is now clear, for being a radical esthete who believed that art could help us seek (and find) liberty, justice and equality, with beauty and pleasure for all. Advertisement Continue reading the main story He took the Victorian ideal of self-improvement and turned it into the modernist ideal of self-realization and self-expression. Good works (to be truly good) had to meet the highest standards of good taste; socialism was really the highest form of individualism, and ethics became a steppingstone to esthetics. ''Ethics, like natural selection, make existence possible. Esthetics, like sexual selection, make life lovely and wonderful,'' he wrote in ''The Critic as Artist'' which, along with his essays ''De Profundis'' and ''The Soul of Man Under Socialism,'' ought to be on every individual and institutional list of canonical texts. ''Gross Indecency'' resumes performances at the Minetta Lane Theater on May 20, where it has moved after a brief and very successful run at the Greenwich House Theater.

Its text is taken from the transcripts of the 1895 trials, as well as from assorted writings by Wilde and other participant-observers (letters, memoirs, newspapers, epigrams and parables). It is a documentary collage, constructed (and directed) by Moises Kaufman with real subtlety and real aggression. Subtlety and aggression make for a tricky, hard-to-pull-off combination, but Wilde mastered both as a writer and a personage, just as he mastered rigor and languor, and joined a highly stylized mode of effeminacy to a still more highly stylized mode of virility. Wilde's trials began when he got caught in a virulent Oedipal struggle between his lover, the beautiful and feral Lord Alfred Douglas, and Douglas's father, the venomous and feral Marquess of Queensberry. Queensberry called Wilde a sodomite in public; Douglas encouraged Wilde to sue for libel, and as a result Wilde was prosecuted, humiliated and imprisoned for sodomy.

''Your hatred of your father was of such stature that it entirely outstripped, o'er threw, and overshadowed your love of me,'' Wilde wrote in ''De Profundis,'' his magnificent letter to Douglas from prison, a confession, a lover's and a martyr's discourse. ''There was no struggle between them at all, or but little; of such dimensions was your Hatred and of such monstrous growth. . . . Only what is fine, and finely conceived, can feed Love. But anything will feed Hate. There was not a glass of champagne you drank, not a rich dish you ate of in all those years, that did not feed your Hate and make it fat. So to gratify it, you gambled with my life, as you gambled with my money, carelessly, recklessly, indifferent to the consequence. If you lost, the loss would not, you fancied, be yours. If you won, yours, you knew, would be the exultation, and the advantages of victory.'' The trials were wars of words and world views. It was Victorian morality versus estheticism and nascent modernism; heterosexuality, with the force of law behind it, versus homosexuality, with the impetus of desire.

Alfred Douglas had coined the phrase ''the love that dare not speak its name.'' A hack Victorian journalist had made the point more brutally when he advised writers never to violate the social contract, which insured that a fact that all of society had agreed not to acknowledge was as good as no fact at all. In ''Gross Indecency,'' the wonderful young actor Michael Emerson shows us with his voice, his stance and the tilt of his head just how shocking (how appalling, how titillating, how thrilling) Wilde must have been. There he was, in a cello-shaped coat of his own design, in soft pastel shirts and ties, in knee breeches and silk stockings. (''Strange that a pair of silk stockings should so upset a nation,'' he remarked after his 1882 tour of the United States.) Don't forget the long, artfully waved hair, the cigarette held between the fingers of a languid mauve-gloved hand, the green carnation in the buttonhole, or the fashion model's look of suave provocativeness, adopted when he posed for photographs.

''There is a sort of horribly feminine air about him,'' Nathaniel Hawthorne's son Julian confided to his diary, while the fervently decorous Henry James called him ''a fatuous fool, tenth-rate cad, an unclean beast.'' Advertisement Continue reading the main story But if you were not appalled, you were enchanted. The voice seemed to be caressing itself and its audience. Wilde wrote rapturously of love and beauty (both secular and spiritual), then masked his idealism in witty, emotionally impenetrable epigrams and paradoxes. It is as if he were ravishingly naked and ravishingly clothed all at once. He turned oppositions into elective affinities: Oscar Wilde, Christian martyr and pagan sybarite; cultural conservator and revolutionary. Irony isn't dangerous anymore, but it was when Wilde used it. We use it now to bring action and emotion to a smirking standstill; he used it to spur them on and achieve an intellectual catharsis. The fact of irony contents us, but he knew it was meant to expose what we should be discontented with. Mr. Emerson's performance also does what productions of Wilde's plays do all too seldom.

It gets under the skin of the wit; shows us the man in his emotional vulnerability, as well as his aphoristic glory. We're so used to the impervious elegance and cheek of these plays -- ''The Importance of Being Earnest,'' ''An Ideal Husband,'' ''Lady Windermere's Fan,'' ''A Woman of No Importance'' -- that we ignore or overlook the passion and sorrow that threaten to break the epigrams into little pieces. Wilde's epigrams work because their ease is hard won and, in the end, valiant. Wilde died in 1900 at the age of 46. Just a month before his death in a modest Paris hotel, he managed to get out of bed, walk to a cafe with a friend, drink absinthe and walk slowly, painfully, home again. ''My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death,'' he announced.

''One or the other of us has to go.'' GROSS INDECENCY: THE THREE TRIALS OF OSCAR WILDE to Play Hilberry Theatre, 1/10-3/22 GROSS INDECENCY: THE THREE TRIALS OF OSCAR WILDE to Play Hilberry Theatre, 1/10-3/22 Tweet Share Moisés Kaufman 's Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde continues the Hilberry Theatre's 51st season in Midtown Detroit. Playing January 10 through March 22, 2014, Kaufman's Lucille Lortel and Outer Critics Circle award-winning work is a fast-paced, historically accurate, documentary style piece of theatre that reveals the destructive powers of hate and prejudice. Tickets for Gross Indecency range from $12-$30 and are available by calling the Hilberry Theatre Box Office at (313) 577-2972, online at Hilberry.com, or by visiting the box office at 4743 Cass Avenue on the corner of Hancock Street.

Set in 1895 London, this courtroom drama draws from a collection of court records, diaries, and news sources to provide audiences a firsthand look at how hateful prejudice cut short the career of one of the great artists of the 19th century. Oscar Wilde brought a libel suit against the Marquess of Queensberry, the father of his youthful lover, for having publicly declared Wilde a sodomite. As a result, England's man-of-the-hour set in motion a series of events that would quickly lead to his ruin. During the course of these trials, Wilde's art became a topic of much scrutiny, with detractors often questioning whether Wilde's work should even be considered art. Moisés Kaufman offers the "possibility that art can give us tools to deal with life in a way that is much more useful - that it can bring back a certain sort of profound spirituality." John Corvino, Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Wayne State University, will take the stage at 7:15 p.m. before the performance on January 16th for a discussion on themes central to the show.

Corvino has written, debated, and lectured extensively on gay rights, and frequently debates with opponents of same-sex marriage including Maggie Gallagher, the former head of the National Organization for Marriage, and Glenn Stanton from the Christian conservative campaigning group Focus on the Family. Corvino argues that spirited dialogue and debate with opponents of homosexuality and same-sex marriage is essential to convince the wider American public of both the merits of same-sex marriage and the moral acceptability of homosexuality. Related Articles

Question: The 1997 play 'Gross Indecency' by Moises Kaufman was about the three trials of which man in the late 19th century?
Answer: OSCAR WILDE